Fred On Everything — Scurrilous Commentary by Fred Reed

Thinking About Intelligence

More Trouble Than It's Worth

I have decided that intelligence
is pernicious, and should be extirpated. It just causes trouble. Practically
every damn fool, deleterious thing our sorry race has done can be traced to
intelligence. It is a bad idea. When it is not merely a bad idea, it is usually
a waste of time.

Consider. William Buckley is very smart. So is Gore Vidal. Yet in their debates
they wrangled like excessively elegant cats and could never agree on anything,
except that they were both very smart. So what was the use? Two taxi drivers
in a Chicago bar could have failed equally well to decide anything. Or they
could have come to opposed and equally erroneous conclusions.

Pick your subject—economics, say, or foreign policy, or crime. You
will find brilliant men on Left and Right, each arguing intricately to a bellowing
claque of witless followers who don’t know anything about it either.
You can tell where they will come out by seeing where they went in—on
the Left or on the Right.

Generally intelligence has no effect on conclusions, which are glandularly
determined. It just rationalizes hormonal inevitabilities.

Further, there’s no point in knowledge, except to show off with in
sports bars. If you are in Willie’s Rib Pit to watch boxing and know
about the Long Count (in the Cribb-Molineaux fight), then you amount to something.
You do no harm, anyway. All other knowledge is suspect. At best, it is a minor
vice, like crossword puzzles. At worst, it encourages people to do catastrophic
things with a smug sense of fundamental rightness. The people who got America
into Iraq were no end bright and could say impressive things like “Twenty-Seventh
Caliphate” and “Theravada Sufism.” Much good it did them.
Or us.

Brains just allow you to be more elaborately and ornately disastrously wrong.

However, smart people are at least interesting, like rare tumors, so early
on I started having a lot of smart friends. I noticed that most of them were
crazy. The right-wingers were hostile paranoids with the empathy of a torque
wrench who wanted to nuke somebody. I don’t think they really cared
who. The left-wingers were angry totalitarians-in-waiting with minds closed
tighter than Fort Knox. For this they needed IQs of 160? You could do as well
with derelicts in the Port Authority Bus Station at three a.m.

See, what happens is, as kids the bright don’t fit in. They don’t
have much in common with anybody. They dress funny and get made fun of. They
can’t dance. They don’t get laid much, or at all. This warps their
heads. They retreat into isolation with others like them, become contemptuous
of everyone else to get even, and deal in abstractions because it’s
all they know. (I claim that if Marx had been able to jitterbug, the Soviet
Union would never have existed.)

In short, a large IQ is an infallible predictor of emotional inadequacy.

Where intelligence unfortunately does work reasonably well is in the sciences.
Really smart men have ideas; lesser men, usually engineers, make them explode;
the least men get the triggers. This suggests that we ought to put a bounty
on engineers.

Anyway, at first I figured my friends were nut jobs because I just had strange
tastes in friends. Maybe I attracted the demented. Then I found myself on
a list-serve of people, mostly men (who are crazier by far than women), who
were interested in race, intelligence, and the differences between various
human groups.

Many were professors at places like Stanford and MIT—scientists and
anthropologists not of the first rank, nor of the second—too rigid,
I thought, for originality—but nonetheless highly intelligent. Sometimes
one would demurely let slip that “I got 1600 on my SATs before they
dumbed them down,” (People attach their self-respect to what they have.
In high school I knew a country boy who prided himself on being able to pee
farther than anyone else.)

Here I figured was a window into academe, full of towering minds like Plato.
These were not squirrels I bumped into in the back alleys of life. They were
the real article. I eagerly awaited clarity, dispassion, and the self-abnegation
of earnest bloodhounds in disinterested pursuit of Truth. Ha.

No. They too started with their premises, which they didn’t seem to
realize were premises, and reasoned doggedly to…their premises. In this
they reminded me of Pooh and Piglet tracking the Heffalump around the bush.

An example: One of them used Google to search for rescue operations in the
US, Mexico, and China. He found countless rescue stories for America—trapped
miners, children in wells, cats in trees, what have you—and only one
or two for China and Mexico. From this he did not conclude that the English
press just doesn’t cover Mexico and China well—I searched in Spanish
and found lots. No. He decided that Mexicans and Chinese do not regard individual
life as important. They just don’t bother to rescue people, see.

I don’t know whether this guy had 1600 boards, but if so, he needs
to try for 3200 next time.

Here you have it: large IQ, zero grasp of humanity, all is abstractions.
(I have another theory that people become psychologists because they lack
the normal grasp of human behavior and spend eight years trying to learn what
everybody else already knows. A doctorate in psychology is a sure sign of
confusion.)

I have lived in both Mexico and China—well, Taiwan—and can report
that the fellow’s notions of Sino-Mexican unconcern are highly cephaloproctological.

The tired business of one group or another not caring about human life resonates
among the insular smart. It is perennially appealing to conservatives. “Defense
intellectuals,” scintillating types with flat heads from being dropped
that you could set a martini on, used to say that China could sacrifice five
hundred million people in a nuclear war without caring. Today it’s Moslems.
(Left-wing intellectuals, similarly afflicted, say “We must sacrifice
the masses in this generation to build communism in the next.” Both
like the idea of extermination.)

Does any of this make sense? I picture young Pedro running to tell his daddy
that sister Maria just fell into the well. “Let her drown, hijo.
We Mexicans don’t do no steenking rescue.” After the earthquake
that leveled Mexico City in ‘85, passersby on the sidewalks doubtless
ignored the screams of the trapped, hands flapping piteously from beneath
the rubble, because Mexicans don’t do rescue. And at the firehouses,
firemen insouciantly drinking tequila and Squirt and playing cards, because
Mexicans don’t do rescue.

We ought to put something in the water to keep IQs down. There would be so
much less noise.

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